500 billion lost: Google is experiencing the biggest crash in the company’s history
After presenting the current quarterly figures, Google parent Alphabet experienced the biggest stock market crash in its company history on Thursday. Within a few hours, the company lost around half a trillion dollars in value.
Historic crash on the stock market
The major IT companies are currently announcing their quarterly figures. While investors reacted positively to Microsoft’s report, prices at other companies such as Intel plummeted. The share price of Google parent company Alphabet was particularly hit hard. The stock fell by up to 13.5 percent on Thursday. This corresponds to a loss in market capitalization of over 500 billion dollars (around 450 billion euros). For the company, this marks the largest single share price slide in the company’s history. The decline even exceeds the massive declines at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and during the financial crisis in September 2008.
The trigger for the loss in value was the business figures for the third quarter of 2026 published on Wednesday evening. Although group sales rose by a quarter year-on-year and the cloud business doubled sales to 30.71 billion dollars (around 28 billion euros), investors reacted with concern. Free cash flow fell deep into the red at -9.1 billion dollars (around -8 billion euros). Analysts had previously only expected -2.7 billion dollars (around -2 billion euros).
Billions in AI spending
The main reason for the unexpectedly negative balance sheet is loud Business Insider the huge spending on AI infrastructure. Alphabet invested $51.3 billion (around €46 billion) in capital goods in the past quarter. To cover these costs, the company took on $29 billion (approximately €26 billion) in new debt and sold shares worth a net $12.4 billion (approximately €11 billion) over the same period.
The interest burden increased at the same time. While Alphabet paid $143 million (around 128 million euros) in interest in the same quarter last year, the amount has now increased almost sevenfold. In addition, a write-down on the SpaceX investment of 8.7 billion dollars (around 8 billion euros) weighed on the result. Interesting: Despite everything, Nvidia still holds the absolute negative record. On January 27, 2025, the hardware manufacturer lost almost 600 billion dollars (around 538 billion euros) in value in one day due to investor concerns about Chinese competitor DeepSeek.
Weak search engine business
Another problem area is the search engine business. Search engine advertising revenue was $63.35 billion (about 57 billion euros), but missed analysts’ expectations and remained almost unchanged compared to the previous quarter. Philipp Schindler, Chief Business Officer at Google, explained that monetization in AI mode is currently even lower. To counteract this, the company is now expanding advertisements in the AI overviews internationally. Whether Alphabet’s investments in AI will soon pay off remains to be seen. For 2027, management expects capital expenditure of around another 300 billion dollars (around 269 billion euros).
Amit Gohar is Technical writer at ResearchSnipers.com, he is well versed Technology News writer, he has completed is MS computer Science in 2020. He can be reached at amit.g@researchsnipers.com
